The primary problem is that it is very difficult to create a financially profitable micropayment system for the operator. If you look at banks (in Finland we have a very efficient direct bank transfer system, top of the world, not cheques) and credit unions, they can not really handle anything less than several euros. Telcos are actually the most skilled profit makers on small transactions, but even their limit is around 10 - 30 cents.
It is possible to push the cost of profitable transaction lower, but it is not trivial. The proposed micropayment systems have usually focused more on technology than finance or customer acceptance.
The second issue is are people willing to accept the system. That is market psychology. Personally, I think that people are willing to pay even small amounts, but it has to be transparent and consumers must be protected from unforeseen charges. Most people pay for electricity and telephone per usage without thinking about it every time they use the service, because they know what kind of bill they can expect at the end of the month.
If you can design a system that protects the consumer from unforeseen expences and also protects the consumer from the fear of unforeseen expences (get it?), I believe that a micropayment system could be possible.
Disclaimer: My company is involved in this business and I have been working on a product that enables micropayments.
Trying to encourage the development of technology in your country by limiting access of outside competition has been tried before. In many cases this has given rise to national champions, who are behind the world in the quality of their products and has caused the customers to suffer. For example consumers in India were stuck with outdated mechanical and electorincal products, until the controls were lifted and the market flooded with mostly Chinece produtcs. The consumers benefited and the local manufacturers were shaken badly.
In a similar way the Finnish government was stuck for years with a national government developed word processing program in the 1980's and early 1990's.
So from this point of view the Chinese government might be painting itself into a technology corner, potentially being stuck to an inferior product.
However the Chinese market is so huge that there is room for internal competition. Also software as a product has a tendency towards forming a monopoly, due to the high costs of entering the market and the low costs of replicating the product. So an occasional shaking of the emergent structure might well be justified.
We should also be asking how much the EU bureocracy is paying to Microsoft each year and how much could be saved by moving to Open Office.
It would be interesting to know if the Chinese directive is targeted only to office applications or if it applies to other software also. This could be a boon to the Chinese software industry in terms of ERP software, network managemet, CAD etc.
If we compare the Minitel to the Internet, we should understand the different evolutionary paths they took.
Minitel started with the idea of providing service to ordinary people. There were similar projects in other countries, all were pretty much built on the paradigm of dumb terminals, a centralized data switch and servers. Note that this paradigm assumes that services are something that companies and organizations provide, not individuals.
What made the Minitel success, was that it was provided for free or very cheaply to customers. I don't see any other difference when compared to other less successfull projects in other countries.
The Internet took a completely different evolutionary path. We can pretty much say that the Internet as we now know it was not really designed, it just happened. The focus of the development work was initially very much in the infrastructure protocols and the only service was connecting computers. After TCP/IP was standardized the focus moved to applications and their protocols. The actual services were lagging behind the technology that was underneath. Many people even considered that an application is the same thing as a service.
At the time Minitel was introduced, it would have been impossible to provide same kind of service with the added cost of TCP/IP infrastructure. However Minitel was an evolutionary close end.
This approach to service vs. infrastructure can be seen in Gopher and WWW. Gopher was built in Minnesota just to get some information on the network easily. The data format was based on directories and ASCII files. Very simple, very efficient and in the early 1990's Gopher was running hot. WWW was a system only used by physicist and I remember telling people that Gopher is good and there is no way people are going to start formatting their sensible ASCII files with those funny little tags.
While the WWW also happened instead of being a visionary design for an international information network, it provided a pretty good balance of multimedia features, de-centralization, simplicity and eye candy, combined with flexibility and a growth path. Note that some aspects of the original design, like the annoitation servers, have practically disappeared.
If we want to learn something from this, it is that on the short run the service itself wins, on the long run the infrastructure that can evolve wins.
Since so many people appear to be clueless, let us start with the basics.
Physics: Any radio transmitter's radiated power diminishes in relation to the square of the distance, meaning that transmitter can affect devices close much more than devices far away.
Any radio receiver is also a transmitter. Any complex electronic device is a transmitter, unless properly shielded. Any piece of conductor is an antenna for radio frequency energy of several frequencies.
What this means, is that your cellphones, radios, computers, mp3 players etc. transmit energy, that _might_ be picked up by some piece of wiring in the airplane and be transmitted to some device where it messes up things. Your laptop may be shielded, but your mouse and headphone cords may act as antennas and carry the signals outside the computer.
Since airplanes are expensive and certifying stuff to put into that plane is also expensive, they fly with technology that is several decades old. If you want to change that technology, the price will be transferred to the price of the ticket (somebody has to pay it, companies do not have money lying around just because they are companies and for example most US carriers are currently losing, not making money).
So when the technical people who are supposed to know about these things say that you should not use certain types of electronics in the plane, there is a reason for it. High school physics might tell you how radios are supposed to work, but the real world is more complex than that.
Now it might be that the plane is new and has shielded electronics or it might be that your particular piece of kit does not emit radiation. This does not matter, it is impossible in practice to have a list of allowable plane/electronics combinations, it is much more safer to just forbid everyhing.
Radio interference is a subtle thing and not always obvious. There is not just the carrier frequency and the harmonic frequencies. There are also the frequencies that appear from the coding of the data, particular data patterns, internal frecuencies that escape through the antenna etc.
It is not likely that the RF interference would cause a plane to just drop out of the sky. But it could affect navigation instrumentation, causing for example the plane to fly in an altitude, that is reserved for planes going the other way. Which does not usually cause an accident, because there are also other safeguards, but it reduces the margin of safety.
Personally, I make always sure that I have plenty of margin in whatever I do. I do not like scenarios where a single mistake could kill me. And I do not like it when other people make that decision for me, without telling me.
The cell phone system is also not happy about having a handset which is visible to a large amount of base stations at the same time. One phone can tie up a lot of slots or frequencies. Handovers can also be problematic.
And contrary to some comments, I am not aware of any area of the world where the authorities allow using cellular phones in flight, based on few trips over recent years in Europe, Asia and South America. Sometimes the use of phones is allowed on ground, with a specific permission from the plane's captain.
A wrist phone with a Bluetooth headset is not a totally stupid idea. One less gadget to carry. The wristwatch has the display needed to operate the phone.
However even with current technologies the power requirements for cellular telephony make the watch rather bulky. But having GPRS in the wrist watch makes it potentially a rather neat piece of kit, you could have your calendar, selected e-mail subjects, network monitoring etc. easily available.
But instead of carrying it all on the wrist, what I have been thinking about is placing the CPU, memory, communications stuff and powerpack in one unit that can be stashed away and then use Bluetooth to access the system. The wristwatch could have a display and a couple of buttons. All the programming is in the computing unit, which could be anything from a simple Java phone to a full computer.
For more demanding data entry use something like a chord or a foldable keyboard. To work on more than a few lines, use a HUD or a separate LCD display. To have a camera, make it separate and use the wrist display to aim and the computing unit to save pictures. Great for peeking over people's heads in a parade.
This setup would be mostly for hardcore nerds, civilians are likely to prefer simpler systems. And I see a major problem in how to power all these different devices. Having to charge half a dozen devices each night becomes a hassle at some point.
Passing airport security checks becomes more fun, too. I got my money's worth yesterday, with a cell phone, GPS, Palm, not to mention laptop, watch, keys, belt and coins.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with micropayments is twofold.
The primary problem is that it is very difficult to create a financially profitable micropayment system for the operator. If you look at banks (in Finland we have a very efficient direct bank transfer system, top of the world, not cheques) and credit unions, they can not really handle anything less than several euros. Telcos are actually the most skilled profit makers on small transactions, but even their limit is around 10 - 30 cents.
It is possible to push the cost of profitable transaction lower, but it is not trivial. The proposed micropayment systems have usually focused more on technology than finance or customer acceptance.
The second issue is are people willing to accept the system. That is market psychology. Personally, I think that people are willing to pay even small amounts, but it has to be transparent and consumers must be protected from unforeseen charges. Most people pay for electricity and telephone per usage without thinking about it every time they use the service, because they know what kind of bill they can expect at the end of the month.
If you can design a system that protects the consumer from unforeseen expences and also protects the consumer from the fear of unforeseen expences (get it?), I believe that a micropayment system could be possible.
Disclaimer: My company is involved in this business and I have been working on a product that enables micropayments.
kiravuo
Trying to encourage the development of technology in your country by limiting access of outside competition has been tried before. In many cases this has given rise to national champions, who are behind the world in the quality of their products and has caused the customers to suffer. For example consumers in India were stuck with outdated mechanical and electorincal products, until the controls were lifted and the market flooded with mostly Chinece produtcs. The consumers benefited and the local manufacturers were shaken badly.
In a similar way the Finnish government was stuck for years with a national government developed word processing program in the 1980's and early 1990's.
So from this point of view the Chinese government might be painting itself into a technology corner, potentially being stuck to an inferior product.
However the Chinese market is so huge that there is room for internal competition. Also software as a product has a tendency towards forming a monopoly, due to the high costs of entering the market and the low costs of replicating the product. So an occasional shaking of the emergent structure might well be justified.
We should also be asking how much the EU bureocracy is paying to Microsoft each year and how much could be saved by moving to Open Office.
It would be interesting to know if the Chinese directive is targeted only to office applications or if it applies to other software also. This could be a boon to the Chinese software industry in terms of ERP software, network managemet, CAD etc.
kiravuo
Tire design is not as easy, Gecko tires would most likely stick to dirt, not the road. It would be like braking on ball bearings.
Unless you attach a lint roller on the top of each tire to pick up the dirt...
Seriously, my rock climbing shoes use sticky rubber and if I walk on sand or dirt I have to clean the shoes before I climb.
kiravuo
If we compare the Minitel to the Internet, we should understand the different evolutionary paths they took.
Minitel started with the idea of providing service to ordinary people. There were similar projects in other countries, all were pretty much built on the paradigm of dumb terminals, a centralized data switch and servers. Note that this paradigm assumes that services are something that companies and organizations provide, not individuals.
What made the Minitel success, was that it was provided for free or very cheaply to customers. I don't see any other difference when compared to other less successfull projects in other countries.
The Internet took a completely different evolutionary path. We can pretty much say that the Internet as we now know it was not really designed, it just happened. The focus of the development work was initially very much in the infrastructure protocols and the only service was connecting computers. After TCP/IP was standardized the focus moved to applications and their protocols. The actual services were lagging behind the technology that was underneath. Many people even considered that an application is the same thing as a service.
At the time Minitel was introduced, it would have been impossible to provide same kind of service with the added cost of TCP/IP infrastructure. However Minitel was an evolutionary close end.
This approach to service vs. infrastructure can be seen in Gopher and WWW. Gopher was built in Minnesota just to get some information on the network easily. The data format was based on directories and ASCII files. Very simple, very efficient and in the early 1990's Gopher was running hot. WWW was a system only used by physicist and I remember telling people that Gopher is good and there is no way people are going to start formatting their sensible ASCII files with those funny little tags.
While the WWW also happened instead of being a visionary design for an international information network, it provided a pretty good balance of multimedia features, de-centralization, simplicity and eye candy, combined with flexibility and a growth path. Note that some aspects of the original design, like the annoitation servers, have practically disappeared.
If we want to learn something from this, it is that on the short run the service itself wins, on the long run the infrastructure that can evolve wins.
kiravuo
Since so many people appear to be clueless, let us start with the basics.
Physics: Any radio transmitter's radiated power diminishes in relation to the square of the distance, meaning that transmitter can affect devices close much more than devices far away.
Any radio receiver is also a transmitter. Any complex electronic device is a transmitter, unless properly shielded. Any piece of conductor is an antenna for radio frequency energy of several frequencies.
What this means, is that your cellphones, radios, computers, mp3 players etc. transmit energy, that _might_ be picked up by some piece of wiring in the airplane and be transmitted to some device where it messes up things. Your laptop may be shielded, but your mouse and headphone cords may act as antennas and carry the signals outside the computer.
Since airplanes are expensive and certifying stuff to put into that plane is also expensive, they fly with technology that is several decades old. If you want to change that technology, the price will be transferred to the price of the ticket (somebody has to pay it, companies do not have money lying around just because they are companies and for example most US carriers are currently losing, not making money).
So when the technical people who are supposed to know about these things say that you should not use certain types of electronics in the plane, there is a reason for it. High school physics might tell you how radios are supposed to work, but the real world is more complex than that.
Now it might be that the plane is new and has shielded electronics or it might be that your particular piece of kit does not emit radiation. This does not matter, it is impossible in practice to have a list of allowable plane/electronics combinations, it is much more safer to just forbid everyhing.
Radio interference is a subtle thing and not always obvious. There is not just the carrier frequency and the harmonic frequencies. There are also the frequencies that appear from the coding of the data, particular data patterns, internal frecuencies that escape through the antenna etc.
It is not likely that the RF interference would cause a plane to just drop out of the sky. But it could affect navigation instrumentation, causing for example the plane to fly in an altitude, that is reserved for planes going the other way. Which does not usually cause an accident, because there are also other safeguards, but it reduces the margin of safety.
Personally, I make always sure that I have plenty of margin in whatever I do. I do not like scenarios where a single mistake could kill me. And I do not like it when other people make that decision for me, without telling me.
The cell phone system is also not happy about having a handset which is visible to a large amount of base stations at the same time. One phone can tie up a lot of slots or frequencies. Handovers can also be problematic.
And contrary to some comments, I am not aware of any area of the world where the authorities allow using cellular phones in flight, based on few trips over recent years in Europe, Asia and South America. Sometimes the use of phones is allowed on ground, with a specific permission from the plane's captain.
kiravuo
A wrist phone with a Bluetooth headset is not a totally stupid idea. One less gadget to carry. The wristwatch has the display needed to operate the phone.
However even with current technologies the power requirements for cellular telephony make the watch rather bulky. But having GPRS in the wrist watch makes it potentially a rather neat piece of kit, you could have your calendar, selected e-mail subjects, network monitoring etc. easily available.
But instead of carrying it all on the wrist, what I have been thinking about is placing the CPU, memory, communications stuff and powerpack in one unit that can be stashed away and then use Bluetooth to access the system. The wristwatch could have a display and a couple of buttons. All the programming is in the computing unit, which could be anything from a simple Java phone to a full computer.
For more demanding data entry use something like a chord or a foldable keyboard. To work on more than a few lines, use a HUD or a separate LCD display. To have a camera, make it separate and use the wrist display to aim and the computing unit to save pictures. Great for peeking over people's heads in a parade.
This setup would be mostly for hardcore nerds, civilians are likely to prefer simpler systems. And I see a major problem in how to power all these different devices. Having to charge half a dozen devices each night becomes a hassle at some point.
Passing airport security checks becomes more fun, too. I got my money's worth yesterday, with a cell phone, GPS, Palm, not to mention laptop, watch, keys, belt and coins.
kiravuo